29 Facts About Lois Lenski

Lois Lenore Lenski Covey was a Newbery Medal-winning author and illustrator of picture books and children's literature.

Lois Lenski's work includes children's picture books and illustrated chapter books, songbooks, poetry, short stories, her 1972 autobiography, Journey into Childhood, and essays about books and children's literature.

Lois Lenski provided illustrations for books by other authors, including the first edition of The Little Engine that Could by Watty Piper, and the first four volumes of Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series.

Lois Lenski, a Prussian-born Lutheran clergyman and theologian, and Marietta Young Lois Lenski, a Franklin County, Ohio native, who was a schoolteacher before her marriage.

When Lois Lenski was six, her family moved to the small town of Anna, Ohio, where her father was called to be a pastor.

Lois Lenski's minor was in fine arts, with her coursework concentrating on drawing and lettering.

Lois Lenski then spent several months traveling in Italy before returning to the United States.

On June 8,1921, immediately after her return from Italy, Lois Lenski married Arthur Covey, a muralist who had been one of her instructors at the School of Industrial Art and for whom she had worked as an assistant on mural projects before she left for London.

Covey, who was 16 years older than Lois Lenski, expected his wife to take full responsibility for the household and children even if doing so meant that she would have no time for creative work.

Lois Lenski refused to give up, later writing that Covey's attitude helped her to realize how important her work was to her.

Lois Lenski hired household help when she could and carved out time to work in her studio.

Lois Lenski continued to write, publishing her last picture book, Debbie and her Pets, in 1971 and her autobiography in 1972.

Lois Lenski died September 11,1974, at her home in Tarpon Springs.

Lois Lenski's first publication was a coloring book called A Children's Frieze Book: To-Put-Together for Home Decoration, for which she was paid $100.

Lois Lenski produced three books of paper dolls for the same publisher, Platt and Munk, during 1918 and 1919.

In 1920 Lenski chose to study in London in part because it was the longstanding center of children's book publishing, a field in which American educators, publishers and librarians began to engage seriously only after World War I In London she illustrated three children's books for the publisher John Lane, including new editions of two stories by Wind in the Willows author Kenneth Grahame.

In 1927, pioneering children's book editor Helen Dean Fish suggested that Lois Lenski should try writing and illustrating her own stories.

Lois Lenski originally wrote her first book, Skipping Village, as poetry, changing it to prose at the request of her editor.

In 1932 Lois Lenski published The Little Family, an innovative picture book which was the first such book sized to fit small children's hands.

Until the mid-1940s Lois Lenski continued to illustrate other authors' books as well as her own, working with writers including Maud Hart Lovelace, Watty Piper, and Hugh Lofting.

However, her biographer Bobbie Malone notes that while Lois Lenski wrote about her work as an illustrator in the 1920s in her autobiography, she did not mention her later work of this type, even on "landmark" books like Piper's Little Engine and Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy books.

Lois Lenski conducted extensive research for Phebe Fairchild and her subsequent historical and regional novels, including site visits and archival research in her quest to accurately present the physical settings, material culture, speech patterns, and other aspects of the daily lives of her protagonists, as well as their broader social and historical contexts.

Some books directly resulted from this correspondence; for example, in 1947 Lois Lenski traveled to Mississippi County, Arkansas, after a class in the rural community of Yarbro heard her read aloud on the radio and invited her to visit.

Lois Lenski continued to write Regional and Roundabout books until 1968.

Lois Lenski later explained that she needed a song for her white cotton-pickers, and as the only picking songs she had found during her research belonged to the distinctive traditions of African-American pickers, she wrote a song for her characters.

Lois Lenski understood her role as that of an outsider whose job was to observe, document, and share what she had learned with other outsiders.

Lois Lenski wanted her books to convey a sense of tolerance and acceptance of difference, mutual respect, empathy and pride in the country's cultural richness.

Lois Lenski intended the books to promote empathy and, through the characters' experiences, serve as examples of social and emotional growth.

Kathleen Hardee Arsenaut concludes that Lois Lenski's "determined view that good character and loving families will invariably overcome social prejudice and economic injustice strikes the modern reader as naive and simplistic," and that her insistence on happy endings through "hopefulness, kindness and self-control" undermined her effectiveness as a purveyor of social realism and at times, as in the case of her work to publicize the conditions faced by migrant workers, an activist.